Necessary Evil (28 page)

Civil War ciphers might be easy, but
Alexander’s just did not give.

Despite his injuries and the excitement,
Gregory was up half the night of the accident working on it - and went right
back into his office after our morning trail inspection. He was still there
when I left for work.

Before leaving, I poked my head in and asked
how things were going. I received a dismissive grunt, from which I took that
things weren’t going well at all. I left for work and to check on Trusty.

Leah showed me the kennel where Trusty was
recuperating. She was weak and obviously in pain, yet she wiggled when she saw
me, struggling against her restraints to get up before finally giving up and
licking my hand in fervent greeting. I cooed and stroked her and reassured
myself that she was still my loveable mutt before I turned to Leah for the prognosis.

“She’s broken a rib,” she said, her lips
tight with concern. “I want to keep her in here for a few days, keep an eye on
her. I don’t know what kind of prowlers you’ve got wandering around on your
farm, but, if they’re willing to do this to a dog, I don’t know what they’d do
to you or to the horses.”

“We’ve called the police,” I said, as we
walked back into the receptionist area. Che Che was tapping away on her
keyboard, carefully keeping her eyes on the screen. “They’re looking into it.
Anyway, they’re too cowardly to even go into the barns, let alone get close to
one of us.”

“That’s not what Darlene Winters told me,”
Leah said, and Che Che couldn’t help but perk up at the name of our local
celebrity. “She said that someone was hurt last night.”

“The police are
on
it,” I insisted.
“What else do you want me to do? Call the FBI?”

Leah’s lips grew tighter, but a client
happened to come in with a whimpering Cocker Spaniel, and Leah had to tend to
her.

I sat at my desk and resisted the urge to
call home and see if Greg had cracked the code yet. It was annoying to be so
far away from the scene of the action, yet I knew that it was probably best to
let Gregory have his time alone to study it.

Over the next few days, we devoted every
spare minute to cracking the code. Lindsay, Aunt Susanna, and Jacob spent their
days teaching the camps, and their nights around the dinner table with Gregory,
Darlene, and me. We poured over the cipher and the letter, looking for clues,
and trying every conceivable combination of words from the two hymns and the
Psalm mentioned in the letter.

Once Jacob grasped the cipher, he became
fascinated and started encoding his own messages. He was proud of his new
talent and sticky notes covered in his heavy scrawled began to appear on the fridge
or in the barn, for Lindsay’s eyes only. We all found this amusing, even
Gregory, but I knew he was growing frustrated. Nearly a week had gone by and we
weren’t any closer to an answer.

However, we had learned one thing. Using
deductive reasoning, Gregory had decided that the ‘D’ in Dear, wasn’t part of
the code. It wasn’t stressed – it was just ordinary. That left us with
Y-A-A-P-S-B-L-O-J-T-N-F-M-D-J-Y.

This deduction put us back at the
beginning, double-checking each of the word combinations that we’d tried
before, back when we thought ‘Dear’ was part of the cipher. But it was no good.
The cipher held just as strong.

One night, Gregory and I were sitting
morosely in the kitchen, a copy of the letter at hand and notebooks full of
rejected key phrases tossed on top of it. It was late and we were tired, but
our awkward silence wasn’t simply from exhaustion and defeat.

Ever since the night of the attack, a sort
of uneasy peace had settled over our relationship. Something had changed,
making our old conversation style inappropriate and the new one impossible, at
least for me. I’d been growing more aware of him as time went by and this new
sight was as unnerving as it was unconscious. I felt as though we were going
someplace that I wasn’t ready for.

What he felt was impossible to determine.
His whole focus seemed to be on cracking the cipher and, to everyone else, it
seemed as though nothing had changed between us, at least on his end. Even I
wondered if I had imagined it - it was only when we were alone that I knew he,
too, was struggling with this change.

Of course, talking about it was out of the
question, so we sat side by side, drank coffee, and stared at the opposite
wall.

Gregory grunted and shifted in his chair.
“It’s just as well that I have to run to Charleston tomorrow,” he said
suddenly. “This thing is liable to drive me crazy.”

“You’re going to Charleston?” I asked. I
tried not to sound too interested, but I don’t know how well I succeeded. I
felt massive relief that there would be at least a day where I didn’t have to
deal with my houseguest and his distractingly dark eyes.

This was tempered by the thought that time
would be lost in the treasure hunt, time that would be used by our rivals. Not
that they’d been particularly active lately. Actually, since the attack,
neither I nor Gregory found a single hole or sign of their presence. Gregory
took full credit for this, of course.

“Only took one encounter with me to make
them stay away,” he quipped earlier that morning as he was putting his bicycle
away. “The so-called unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.”

“By which you mean your face?” I’d asked,
grinning.

The more logical reason was, of course,
that they reckoned on our calling the police and decided that it was prudent to
keep their distance.

But they would be back. If I knew
anything, I knew that, and it kept me returning to the code and to long hours
working with the professor, when every other warning sign told me I ought to
keep my distance.

He was nodding in response to my question.

“We’re finished with the book,” he said.
“Well, not finished. The first draft is finished, and now we’re on to editing.
My editor and my agent called me in to have a conversation about it and a new project
next year. I figured, since I’d be down there anyway, I’d check in on Charlie’s
progress. You know how the academics are. Unless you sit hard on them, they’ll
never finish a project.”

He smiled, but I wasn’t able to enjoy the
joke. I made a half-hearted attempt at a laugh, looked at my toes, and tried to
clear my head. If I was so glad he was going, why did my heart feel like it had
sunk to the floor?

Not now, Maddie.

“How far are we from a solution to that
code?” I asked.

He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes.

“Bloody thing,” he muttered. “We could be
days away, or weeks, or hours. I don’t know. Today, Jacob and I ransacked the
first hymn again, using every combination of words we could think of, but
nothing even comes close to working. So we’re going to start on the next one
when I get back. I may send this out to a friend of mine, who cracks ciphers
for fun and profit.” He looked at me. “That would mean bringing someone else in
on the project. I wasn’t sure if you’d be comfortable with that.”

“Not very,” I admitted. “But we have to
crack this quickly. Charlie White just published his story about the intruders,
and we’re bound to have curiosity seekers start trooping in.”

Charlie White’s story had, indeed, hit the
online stands that afternoon. I’d been watching for it, checking his site every
day, praying that he would overlook this one little story.

Of course, he didn’t. The story came with
the prerequisite sensational headline. His writing hadn’t improved in the year
or so since the farm had been featured; further, his information was
superficial and weak, forcing him to pad it - adding more sensationalism than
it needed.

Thankfully, Greg was reported simply as a
“farm hand” and the story was creating only minor ripples. But I assumed it was
the calm before the storm, and I was bracing myself.

Gregory was looking at me in that curious
way of his, his dark eyes taking me in and studying me. I felt enveloped, as
though I was being held without being touched.

“Easy, Warwick,” he said gently. “Rome wasn’t
built in a day. We’ll get there, don’t worry about that. Anyway,” he broke off
eye contact and straightened, as though readying himself for something.
“Anyway, if I can’t crack it, it’s a cinch that our rivals can’t. I’m the best
in the business. They are mere amateurs. You can hardly even call it a
contest.”

Relieved that he’d broken the moment, I
couldn’t help but laugh at this return to his egotistical self, which I think
was his intention. He went back to business then, telling me that he was sending
Jacob to look at the town land records the next day, after his chores were
finished.

“Why do that?” I asked.

“He’s getting underfoot. The classes are
running smoothly, and Susanna couldn’t come up with any farm work for him to
do,” he said. “But it’s not a total loss. I’m sending him to determine that no
land changed Chase hands during the war. It occurred to me that perhaps we
haven’t found it because the boundary lines have changed. It’s a long shot, but
I want to eliminate it.”

I sighed. “Fine by me.”

I checked my watch and found myself
reluctantly taking note that it was late, and I had to go check on the stables.
I think he might have volunteered to go out with me, except Aunt Susanna
wandered into the kitchen, wrapped in her bathroom and moving carefully without
her cane.

She invited Gregory to share a cup of
coffee with her. He agreed, and I was allowed to escape into the safety of the
lonely night.

Gregory left early the next morning, before
I got up. There was a note from him on the counter, telling me that he’d asked
Jacob to check the trails in the mornings and warning me against any more
“nighttime theatrics”.

“
Wait for me before you go dashing out
into the woods again
,” he said. “
No need for both of us to have bloody
noses.”

I was a little annoyed by this: I was
certainly old enough to run things myself, and I was smart enough to know not
to go into the woods at night without a fully-healed Trusty at my side. But I
was relieved that I wouldn’t have to mind the store entirely by myself and I
realized that he was worried I would try to chase the nighttime raiders off on
my own – judging from my earlier actions, it was not a far-out assumption.

As I was ready to leave for work, Jacob showed
up and cheerfully took off on the bicycle, whistling in the clean morning air -
the picture of health and good spirits.

The days passed slowly. I thought I should
have been relieved by Randall’s absence, but I wasn’t. I was restless and irritable.
With Randall down south tending to other business, Aunt Susanna and the others
busy with the classes, and me at the vet’s office visiting Trusty and filing
forms, the code work ceased just when it was at its most interesting. The
nightly meetings ceased, too, as Lindsay and Jacob claimed that they were too
tired to work and went off to hang out together.

Trusty was kept in the hospital - for
observation, the vet said, but we both knew that she wasn’t comfortable letting
the wounded dog go home to a house under siege. That left me roaming alone
around the house and the office, moodily sifting through the old books, trying
to occupy myself so that I wouldn’t have to admit how empty the house seemed.

I even brought a copy of the letter to
work on during slow hours at work. Che Che found this amusing, and tried to
help, but neither of us got very far.

Randall texted every once in a while, but
I didn’t want to encourage communication, so I was slow to answer. But he
called me at work on the second day, I grabbed my cell phone, told Che Che I’d
be right back, and dashed outside to take the call.

It was a gorgeous but sweltering summer
day, almost too hot for pacing in front of the office while we talked. Randall
was rushed, prefacing the conversation by telling me he had only a few minutes
before he and his Charleston connection went to some library.

“Library?” I asked.

“More like a historical house with lots of
unstudied journals, letters, and the like. Charlie has turned up something
interesting down here, Warwick,” he said, excitement infusing his tone. “It
seems the McInnis family was remotely tied to the Lee family, and one of them
wrote about Mary Anna’s funeral in her diary.”

“Oh, really?” I said, swatting at a
hornet. “Anything important about it?”

Randall hesitated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.
It’s just a brief mention in a gossipy journal, and the only reason Charlie
found out is because she is friends with the curator of the collection that
owns the diary, which has never been published. Charlie doesn’t think there’s
much in it – just some speculation about a necklace Mary Anna McInnis was
wearing when she died.”

“A necklace?” I asked. “Was it one of the
ones reported stolen?”

“No. According to the journalist, Mary
Anna died wearing a simple ring on a leather cord around her neck.”

“A ring? Like, an engagement ring?”

“We don’t know. We’re going to take a look
at the journal now. I’m going to scan and forward the passage to you later.
Like I said, it’s not much, but it is interesting - a spinster dying with a
leather cord around her neck.”

“There was more to Mary Anna than we first
supposed.”

“Yes… And the date of her death struck me.
It’s almost dead center between the time Alexander wrote the letter from his
training camp and the last one he wrote with the clue. Curious, isn’t it?”

I frowned. “You think he found out about
her death and
that’s
what made him depressed? That Mary Anna and
Alexander Chase were a
couple
?”

“I don’t know,” Randall said again. “It
seems unlikely, but look at the evidence. Chase leaves, and stuff disappears
from the carefully curated McInnis household. But Mary Anna, the sharp-eyed
mistress, says nothing. It’s not discovered until
after
she goes
visiting. That makes me ask a few questions: Why didn’t she notice the loss? If
she did, why didn’t she say anything? And why did she choose then to go
visiting her relatives? Was it really to get out of a besieged city? Or is it
that she had, let’s say, personal reasons to stay out of the way?”

 “That’s a lot of leaps in logic,
isn’t it?” I asked.

“I’m only asking the questions. Let’s say
they were a couple. Maybe Alexander is in love with her, maybe he’s just
interested in her wealth. He convinces her to marry him. It probably wasn’t
hard to do – she’s a spinster after all, and past her prime.”

“Watch it,” I laughed. “It’s not polite
for a gentleman to point out a lady is not as young as she used to be.”

He laughed, then plunged back in. “But
let’s say McInnis found out about it and that’s what lead to the argument in the
warehouse. McInnis wasn’t about to let a Yankee wanderer come in, marry his
daughter, and walk off with the wealth. And by his actions, it’s pretty obvious
that Chase wasn’t interested in marrying her without the money. So he steals
the goods, and hightails it for New England, leaving poor Mary Anna with
nothing but wounded pride.”

“If that was the case,” I countered, “then
she would have called the police right away.”

“Not if she was too embarrassed to,” he
said. “The man who claimed he loved her went ahead and proved that her father
was right. Some women would rather part with their money than admit they’d been
played for a fool.”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t like
it. It meant that Alexander was worse than a mere thief: he was a philanderer,
too. I could almost see Uncle Michael’s disappointed face. He’d worked so hard
to prove that Alexander had been misunderstood, to clear the family name. Were
we about to prove that he was even worse than was previously thought?

“If he did betray her,” I said, “she’d
never keep the ring. The man broke her heart and stole from her father. She’d
have gotten rid of it.”

“Hell hath no fury, and all of that. Yes,
you’re probably right. We have another clue, but we’re not really any further,
are we?” 

Deflated, I went back into the office. Che
Che beamed at me from over her computer screen.

“Was that your young man?” she asked as I
sat down.

I was confused for a moment, before I
realized that she meant Joe. As I assured her that it was not him, it occurred to
me that he hadn’t called in several days and that his text messages weren’t as
frequent as they had been. He was busy, of course, but he’d been so attentive
that first week he’d been away.

Just as well,
I thought.
It
isn’t as though I haven’t enough on my plate.

Che Che’s daughter, Melanie, came in the
next day with her cat. Seeing her was a welcome break. We’d gone to the same
high school and college, though at different grade levels, and she’d been among
the group of students who worked the dig at my farm. Melanie was practically
the spitting image of her mom, down to the same style clothing and French
features, only she was two inches taller than her mother, just tall enough to
lean on the counter while she chatted with the two of us.

We were still talking when Darlene and
Aunt Susanna unexpectedly showed up at the office.

I was glad to see them and they were happy
and noisy - bringing iced coffee for Che Che and me, and biscuits for the
recuperating Trusty. Aunt Susanna was so lively that her cane hardly touched
the floor as she moved about.

“What happened to the camp?” I asked,
gratefully accepting my coffee.

“They’re having lunch with Lindsay and
Jacob,” Aunt Susanna said.

Darlene chimed in. “We decided to sneak
out and bring poor Trusty a snack.”

She shook the bag of biscuits and the two
dachshunds that were waiting in their crates for their owners began to whine
pitifully.

Che Che hopped up. “She’s in the back.
I’ll show you.”

“Don’t let the boss catch you feeding
her,” I warned as they followed Che Che, chattering happily.

 I turned back to Melanie and found
her shaking her head.

“Darlene Winters,” she said softly, so the
others in the waiting room wouldn’t hear. “Now seeing her brings back a lot of
memories. Allison and I went to school together. We weren’t really close, but
we hung out every once and a while. I couldn’t believe it when she
disappeared.”

“Tragic,” I said. The unfinished nature of
Allison’s disappearance always made me uncomfortable, and I looked for
something else to talk about. Fortunately, the vet was ready for Melanie’s cat
so the conversation concluded naturally.

But as I was turning back to the computer
screen, Melanie stopped and leaned over it.

“Do you know, the last time I saw Allison
Winters alive was that night at your place?” she whispered, her eyes aglow.
When I looked up, she nodded eagerly, shifting her hold on the cat’s carrier.
“I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was coming up to ride that big bay
horse, the one that was terrifying, and she looked as though she was going to
her execution.”

Her tone dropped even lower, making me
lean closer to hear it.

“Why, what was wrong?” I asked.

“She didn’t say,” Melanie said. “She just
looked as though she were dreading the next step. I was convinced for a while
that she’d killed herself. She looked so… determined. I invited her to join us,
but she waved me off and never looked back.” She shook her head. “It was at
that epic party your folks threw for our last dig day with that delicious
Professor Tremonti.”

I stared at her, shocked. Allison had been
at our stables that night? I hadn’t seen her and it was never mentioned in any
of the reports. But then, why would it be? It was a week before her
disappearance was even reported, and it was not unusual for her to go riding at
dusk.

Still, it was chilling to think that she’d
been there on that night of mixed highs and lows. While I was growing to hate
Amber, Joe Tremonti’s would-be-bride, the ill-fated Allison was taking her last
ride on our grounds.

Melanie obviously felt the same way.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” she said. “You just
never know, from one moment to the next, when fate will change everything.”

                                                        
***

I went home at noon to help Lindsay and
Aunt Susanna with the riders at the camp, but my mind wasn’t on them or their
proper riding techniques.

Melanie’s words haunted me. I couldn’t
believe that Allison had been there, on the grounds, and I hadn’t known. There
was no reason why I should have: she’d contacted either Aunt Susanna or Uncle
Michael for permission to ride, and I would have been far too distracted by the
party and my crush to pay attention. What Melanie said about Allison’s fateful
attitude I dismissed as hindsight colored by later events, but what I couldn’t
dismiss was the idea that, if we had been paying more attention, the situation
might not have ended as it did.

The girls were too busy riding to notice
my distraction, but Aunt Susanna and Lindsay both commented on it.

“Something worrying you?” Lindsay asked
when the girls were busy cleaning their tack.

I lied and said no, but Aunt Susanna
asked, “Missing Greg? I know I am – the house doesn’t seem the same without his
noise.”

“
No
,” I said sharply, and left the
stables before they could respond.

I went into my room to change, then down
into the kitchen to grab a snack. It was only about 3:30 and a long, unusually
empty afternoon stretched out before me. I was nervous and irritable, and I
suppose it was inevitable that I should wind up in the office.

Alexander’s letter was in the safe, of
course, but copies of it lay scattered about Gregory’s workplace along with
notes and books and hymnals. My desk alone was free of the clutter, an island
of the present amid the sea of the worn past. It seemed out of place.

I tried to pay a few bills, but my heart
wasn’t in it. I wondered what Gregory was learning in Charleston, annoyed that
he wasn’t calling me with updates, and annoyed with myself for wanting him to
call. My attention wandered from my accounting software to my cell phone, but
it lay by my hand silently, receiving messages from neither Gregory nor Joe.

When the silence and stillness grew too
much for me, I gave up on the bills. I turned on some music to cover the
silence, and began to tidy the room. I straightened the shelves and the papers
on the desk, and began to clear the floor of the overflowing stacks. As I
worked, the music and the activity began to work on my mood, soothing my
troubled thoughts and relaxing my tension.